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Talk:Sam/@comment-2602:306:3740:ECE0:4982:6A02:558B:53A8-20170825065342
I think of it like this. In a post-apocalyptic world, survival calls for a different approach to Ethics and a different moral code. What is good, is so, because it generally causes the greatest benefit for the greatest amount of people in a particular context for which said action is considered good. Hence, for the context of a post-apocalyptic world, the character of Sam is in fact the most ethical as he only kills people who endanger the larger group as a whole, therefore his culling behaviour is for all intents and purposes good, as he further maximizes the chance of survival for remaining members. There is no indication that Sam was a killer before or even soon after the initial rising, and so the worst thing that can be said of Sam is that he is both a Realist, and a Utilitarian, if either of those could ever be construed in a negative light. All of Sam's victim's showed dangerous mental/physical states which caused real direct harm and/or potential harm to the rest of the group. Cynthia vents to Sam worried that she can't maintain a stable mental state, and expresses that she can't cope with the world that they are in. This are dangerous feelings to have, especially in high-stress situations, and can easily lead to suicide, with the added risk of killing others, before you go. The medic from Brendan's group was dying and his presence necessitated Brendan's group staying at the hospital, hence, logically Sam saw that it was best for his group for the medic to die. His plan was once again justified and only had a negative outcome because the conniving wannabe-rapist/traitor John began sowing dissent within Brendan's group. Susan was a basket case who went off the deep end after killing her father, and presented a direct opposition to the purpose of their journey,(to survive through movement as fortification already proved ineffective as seen in the hospital) therefore it was necessary that Susan die in order to advance the group forward without definite risk of harm to all group members. Van Helsing is entertaining, but it is a show full of one dimensional characters who ascribe themselves to certain attributes which they rely on to completely fillout the caricatures of real people which they portray. The cast of Van Helsing is a bunch of edge-lords, codependents, white-knights, token-cowards, and dangerous devil's advocates, who don't actually exist in the real world in such abundance because they are completely insufferable and wouldn't survive outside of their mother's basement let alone in an apocalypse. However, from the dismal cast arises a lone redeemer, Sam. Sam is the everyman, written into the show for the purpose of having depth of character, and being relatable. Sam is the only character who shows the realistic moral shift that one would expect from such a stressful situation, not in order to have any degree of comfort, but just in order to survive. Additionally, the effort put into portraying Sam as kind, intelligent, and caring further serves to denote that he's not of a bad character, but rather he is defeated and resigned to doing what needs to be done in order to survive. In essence the rejection of Sam by the viewer is the rejection of human survivability. A lack of empathy resulting in an inability to truly understand how different his world is from our own, and by extension a failure to accept the hard decisions that he must make in order to do right by him and his. No reasonable person with a vested interest in survival could say that they would have acted differently, and no surviving person with a vested interest in reasonability could say that they would have acted differently.